Broken Government

The Hill

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is so preoccupied by our fiscal crisis he calls himself a â€œone-trick ponyâ€ and a â€œbroken record.â€ But during the government shutdown, the Tea Party conservative wandered into a no-manâ€™s land by criticizing the failed effort to defund ObamaCare â€” even as he denied our government would default on our debt without raising the debt ceiling â€” and RedStateâ€™s Erick Erickson called him a â€œliar.â€

The unseemly attack from Erickson, who accused him of screaming at Sen. Ted Cruz in a GOP senators lunch where the Texanâ€™s failed strategy became the subject of a heated debate, was simply untrue, says Johnson. But it wasnâ€™t as â€œgallingâ€ to Johnson as being deemed a member of the â€œsurrender caucus,â€ just because he agreed the â€œdefundâ€ push was intellectually dishonest.

â€œI donâ€™t know any other Republican senator who spent $9 million of his own money, who ran to be the deciding vote to repeal ObamaCare,â€ said Johnson, adding it wasnâ€™t chump change, only to then be blasted for voting to proceed to final passage on a bill to defund ObamaCare. Of course, for procedural reasons, Cruz and his allies needed Republicans to vote against that measure, but Johnson said the divisive tactic, which Cruz attempted to bring him on board with early on, had â€œzeroâ€ chance of success without a handful of Democrats joining in.

Even before the defund effort consumed Washington, Johnson has been consumed not only with the economic dangers of ObamaCare, but also with the governmentâ€™s disregard for our burgeoning debt burden. Before Johnson was named a budget conferee last week, he was already meeting regularly with House members and a dozen Senate Democrats to try to build consensus for a campaign to educate the public so â€” eventually â€” enough members of both parties can unite behind a solution.

Johnson is fed up with demagoguery and platitudes he hears from both parties, and particularly from President Obama. â€œWe are lying to the American people,â€ Johnson is fond of saying, because politicians are afraid of talking about how huge the problem is and often cling to 10-year projections that mask the extent of the problem. When the budget conference begins next week, Johnson will have with him his sobering charts and graphs detailing the growth of spending as a percentage of GDP, the explosion of out-of-wedlock births and number of Americans in poverty, and the high costs of college vs. inflation. He will pound away these facts: We have a 30-year deficit of between $57 trillion and $107 trillion (depending on whose numbers are assessed and compared to the $96 trillion in all U.S. assets combined from businesses and households), our per capita share of debt would startle most Americans â€” $54,800 per person, compared to less than $36,000 in Greece â€” and by 2023, Social Security will pay out $4.7 trillion more than it takes in, reaching a $10 trillion deficit by 2033.

Itâ€™s hard to be hopeful about the two sides reaching agreement by Dec. 13, as the â€œdealâ€ to reopen the government requires. Johnson said itâ€™s likely the two sides will hit the predictable wall again, particularly if Democrats seek to raise more taxes, which Johnson said was as â€œunrealisticâ€ as the defund effort. But Johnson, who has assembled a â€œsolutions menuâ€ of options for a deal, said he hoped Republicans might be able to trade some sequester relief for new structural reforms to entitlement programs. Even if they canâ€™t solve the problem, Johnson says, he welcomes the opportunity to highlight it.

â€œIâ€™m on a mission,â€ he said. â€œPeople arenâ€™t paying any attention to what weâ€™re doing to our kids and grandchildren.â€

A.B. Stoddard is an associate editor of The Hill, from where this article is adapted